A novel framework for analyzing the green value of food supply chain based on life cycle assessment

The environmental impact is one of the major pillars of concerns when addressing the sustainability of food supply chain. In life cycle assessment of food supply chain, a particular environmental impact category from farming to distribution is aggregated. These values are widely used in determining which supply chain is performing more environmentally sound on the basis of a particular impact category. However, when different categories of environmental impacts are represented in one matrix, different impact categories can exhibit increasing and decreasing trends simultaneously for the same product. Moreover, different impact categories have different units of measurement. All of these factors make it difficult to clearly prefer one supply chain to the other. Therefore, a quantifiable indicator is desirable for each individual product which can represent all impact categories for a single product through a single index and can be easily comparable during decision making. This paper presents a new framework to compute a single index based on Life cycle assessment using vector space theory. This index can be utilized to compare the environmental sustainability among various food supply chains. The index is named as green value of a supply chain. The use of this proposed green value is explained through three case studies with different goals, scopes, system boundaries, and functional units. It is also shown that how the order of green value varies by changing the functional unit of the same product. The contribution of green value is the better interpretation of Life cycle assessment result for the purpose of decision making and is easily understandable to customers, manufacturers, policy makers, and other stakeholders.